Instagram is filled with videos of the shapeless substance. They often begin with a glob of vibrant, wobbling slime on a white surface. Manicured hands soon enter the frame, stretch and pull the goo, then drizzle it back onto the table. The effect is inexplicably transfixing, soothing even, like a spinning mobile mesmerizing a baby.

But after spending considerable time scrolling through these clips, I started to see something in the void: a squishy, candy-colored subculture, made up of millions of young, mostly female fans. They promote their creations, compliment each other in comments, participate in slime drama—and gather at slime conventions.

Maia and Audrey, both 11, inflate a bubble of slime.Brian Finke

So I showed up on a sunny Saturday morning in April at the World Slime Convention in Hershey, Pennsylvania. Roughly 5,000 people had paid between $25 and $45 to gain entrance to the Hershey Lodge and Convention Center. They were mostly children and teens, parents in their wake, hoping to meet their favorite slime stars and buy their slime products.

My first stop was the booth of Liz Park, a slime influencer whose Instagram, @slimeypallets, has more than 75,000 followers. Park has long, black hair, dyed stormy gray at the ends, and she was wearing enormous fake eyelashes and a Mickey Mouse-style headband, each ear plastered with a yellow Slimey Pallets sticker. The tween girls clustered around her booth wanted to score one of those palettes—sampler packages of six or so slimes that Park makes by hand and sells for around $18 each. I tried to step in to say hello, but a girl wearing a sparkly T-shirt pointed at me, turned to her friends, and loudly reported that I had cut the line. I retreated and watched as Park, who at 30 is much older than most of her fans, handed out slimes and signed posters, chatting and laughing.

The World Slime Convention organizers had designated Park one of their Most Valuable Slimers, and although other slime sellers had significantly more followers on social media, her sampler palettes were among the most sought after items. I managed to snag one and then spent the rest of the convention being stopped by mothers asking, “Where did you get that?” When I told one that Slimey Pallets had long since sold out, she looked panicked, as if I'd said her transatlantic flight had been canceled.

Park is one of thousands of indie slime sellers online, some of whom, like her, have evolved into niche celebrities. You might call what they make artisanal slime: stretchy, thicc, and, above all else, satisfying. Shaving cream, fake snow, modeling clay, beads, plastic charms, foam chunks, and jelly cubes are often added to it, all in the pursuit of creating various alluring textures. Perfume-grade oils, too, are added, to make slime smell like blueberry muffins, Thai tea, or freshly baked bread. The result is a beautiful, gooey dessert you can fondle but absolutely cannot put in your mouth. (Labels frequently warn: DO NOT EAT.)

Crunchy slime is often filled with plastic beads or charms, and produces a satisfying crunch sound when squeezed.BRIAN FINKE

The innards of a quality crunchy slime won’t fall out, even when the goo is stretched.BRIAN FINKE

The slime spectacle unfolds largely on social media. In the summer of 2016, when stories about the “teen craze” started appearing, there were 620,000 #slime posts on Instagram; today there are more than 12.2 million and counting. Slime similarly exploded on YouTube: “2017 is undoubtedly the year that slime was a thing, like a big thing,” says Kevin Allocca, head of culture and trends at YouTube. Two million slime videos were uploaded to the site that year, racking up about 17 billion views. Normally, YouTube fads fade away after a few months, as the internet's restless attention moves on to something even newer, shinier, or more outrageous. “But that's not what happened with slime,” Allocca says, “because it became this genre, and we're still seeing steady interest, in a significant volume.”

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The homemade-slime craze grew so spectacularly that manufacturers of its ingredients were forced to adapt, and new companies were created. For a while, stores couldn't keep enough Elmer's glue in stock. “It became a ‘What the heck is going on?’ kind of a moment,” says Nick Hopf, brand director for Elmer's. “We started rethinking the business, rethinking aspects of our supply.” Pretty quickly, Elmer's started selling new items like gallon-size clear glue, all-in-one slime kits, and, later, glow-in-the-dark, color-changing, and metallic glues. Niche companies like Nendo Soft Clay popped up selling ingredients specifically designed to be added to slime. “We're trying to attend as many slime conventions as we can this year so we can meet our fans in person,” says Derek McEwen, cofounder of the modeling clay company. Those companies have their own followings now too.

The World Slime Convention was part craft fair, part celebrity meet and greet, and part young entrepreneurs conference—all wrapped in pastel and rainbow. Attendees, dads excepted, tended toward a wardrobe of pink, purple, and glitter. A sweet scent hung in the air, like a Betty Crocker cupcake with a base note of drying paint.

As I wandered, I watched young slimers network, trying to learn the secrets of becoming influencers. A stage had been set up for Q&A sessions, and at least one grade-school-age kid posed the question “How do you get big on Instagram?” to panelists who didn't look much older.

In the middle of the convention hall were the vendor booths, where four dozen slimers hawked their goods. All kinds of slime were on display: cloud slime (with fake snow), butter slime (with modeling clay), and crunchy slime (filled with beads). For $12 I bought a white slime cup topped with green and pink clay balls and carried it around like the ice cream it resembled.

I stopped to chat with a 13-year-old seller named Sophia. She had, she said, recently pivoted to acai bowls and other food-themed slimes after realizing her previous slime account, which lacked a specific focus, wasn't working. “It wasn't going anywhere,” she said. “I was losing followers, and gaining and losing, so I was like, I'm gonna stop right here.”

Gracefully handling slime takes more skill than you might think. Enthusiasts often practice "drizzling" it onto a table or the palm of their hand.BRIAN FINKE

The small plastic baggies in this girl’s suitcase are filled with slime toppings, likely plastic sprinkles or glitter.BRIAN FINKE

At the end of the convention, I returned to Park's booth. Like many others, she discovered homemade slime through Instagram, a platform where every hashtag opens a different aesthetic universe. Curious what it would feel like, she ordered around $30 worth. But when she opened the package, the slime stuck to her hands and smelled like chemicals. It was gross. It was “opposite from what I would see in an actual slime video on Instagram,” she said. Park watched girls half her age show off beautiful, springy slimes online. “I was like, I can do better. That's how this thing all started.”

Slime, at its most basic, requires just water, school glue, and powdered sodium borate, also known as borax, a common household cleaning agent (and a skin and eye irritant, so some slimers, especially younger ones, swap in baking soda or cornstarch). When mixed with water, borax causes the long molecules in glue to bond with one another, producing a rubbery texture that doesn't stick to surfaces. Over time, though, slime needs to be reactivated with additional borax, and many slimers send customers extra in tiny baggies, which looks alarmingly like cocaine.

On August 5, 2017, Park posted a video of one of her first palettes. Wearing sparkly acrylic nails, she opens a clear plastic jewelry case. Inside, four compartments house different slimes; one is filled with googly eyes, another has a tiny Hello Kitty charm. She holds them up one by one to the camera and squeezes, producing a satisfying cronch—the term of art in the slime world. “My slime pallet finally revealed! Lol,” the caption reads.

Before she found slime, Park was working a couple of nights a week at Donna's, a dive bar in Gardena, California, and taking care of her young daughter. Now she travels around the country selling slime. Park says she has attended about 10 conventions since last fall. When she was preparing to come to Hershey, she packed more than 500 slimes in four 50-pound suitcases and brought them with her on the flight from Los Angeles. A few exploded on the trip due to the altitude. “Casualties,” she told me.

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I was still sitting with Park when a tiny girl walked up and gave her a sunny-colored gift basket filled with candy and a note. “My daughter will love this,” Park said. “Thank you so much, and you know yellow is my logo color, so it's really thoughtful.”

It's likely that Park's young followers will grow out of their slime phase. There's already anecdotal evidence that the fad is going the way of fidget spinners and Beanie Babies. On Etsy, where many indie slimers sell their goods, searches for “slime,” “clear slime,” “butter slime,” and “slime kit” were all down 45 percent or more in April from the same time last year, according to the company. If the worst does happen, I asked Park, what might she do next?

“After slime, it'd be really hard for me to just go and get a regular job,” she said. “I was actually thinking about starting another business, like a vintage clothing shop, so I might do that.”

But to contemplate the future of slime almost seems to defeat its entire purpose. For now, Park's products continue to enchant. Before the convention, I ordered two of her slimes, not knowing what to expect. When they arrived, I stood in my kitchen and gently lifted one out of its shallow plastic container. Kawaiian Galaxy! was a cloud slime tie-dyed soft pink, blue, and white. It felt wet and surprisingly cold. I stretched it between my hands vertically and watched it fall into a beautiful, fluffy mountain in my palm.

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